


Lesser Angels

by severinne



Category: Star Trek AOS/Priest crossover
Genre: Angst, Casual Sex, Crossover, M/M, Mistaken Identity, Walk Into A Bar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-30
Updated: 2013-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-03 00:55:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1063745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/severinne/pseuds/severinne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>McCoy only wanted a quiet place to drink and to hide. He found more than he could ever understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lesser Angels

McCoy knew he had to be in a special breed of hell when the only bar he could find was barely worthy of the description.

Salem wasn’t the most promising name for a bar to begin with but this barren room, filled with the heavy silence of solitary drinkers and a tinny echo of inappropriately cheerful music was clearly designed to repel anyone who dared linger too long. He would have turned tail immediately, if not for the deeper ugliness waiting for him outside, if not for the crackling warning of his last contact with Jim.

 _We’re stuck outside the city walls until daybreak._ The words were garbled by interference on every damn frequency they had tried, but Jim’s frustration had been plain to his ear. _You’re on your own until then, so try to find somewhere to lie low if you can._

 _Oh, sure, no problem,_ he had snarled back, huddled defensively down an alley as pierced through with searchlights as any other part of this hellhole. _This whole city has lying low down to a goddamn science. Never seen so many miserable bastards in one place._

 _Just keep your head down until morning, Bones._ Jim’s stern, snappish tone betrayed the worry of a best friend rather than a captain, one who knew McCoy too well to ignore the raw empathy that had slipped into his gruff observations. _That’s an order._

 _Aye, Captain._ He had aimed for a reassuring drawl, then movement had caught his eye: two armoured men, heavy rifles at the ready, slowing at the entry of his alley. _I gotta go, Jim. Stay safe out there. McCoy out._

That had been over three hours ago – three tense, terror-inducing hours of evading armed guards and haunted stares alike, of inwardly panicking when an hourly gong would bring this seething mass of people to a dead stop for a ritual he couldn’t comprehend but copied as best he could, eyes slanting aside as he drew his sweating hand up and down, side to side. He couldn’t keep a safe distance among these deadened people, couldn’t _breathe_ until he found some sort of shelter from this towering nightmare, some cornerstone of familiarity.

Hence, the bar. And he would forgive its every inhospitable contour if this godforsaken place could put a drink in his hand.

Even that hope seemed foolishly optimistic as McCoy warily approached a long slab of concrete lined with high seats. Superficially, it passed for a bar but the lack of bottles or bartender held him back, fingers worrying the replicated coins in his cloak’s pocket. He squinted at the odd contraption stretching up to the ceiling, its tarnished steel slots and battered sliding door…

‘If you’re not going to order, get out of the way.’

McCoy flinched and shuffled aside without daring to look at the owner of that low, impatient growl. He bowed his head, but watched intently from within his hood as long, pale fingers tipped a brass coin into a vertical slot on the inscrutable device behind the bar. A grinding, rattling sound echoed overhead, and McCoy nearly jumped at the clanging thump behind that small door, which whisked open to reveal a dull, unmarked steel bottle. Underwhelmed yet relieved, McCoy waited until the pale hand claimed the bottle and the door slammed shut before finding the correct coin in his pocket and imitating the other man’s actions.

His reward was a tepid imitation of beer that made up in strength what it lacked in flavour. At the first sip he immediately regretted the loss of his tricorder but if the other patrons’ only affliction was abject misery, he figured he would survive this one lapse in judgment. McCoy cast a furtive glance at the previous customer as he resigned himself to his own seat, and arched a wary eyebrow to see the other man’s bottle still sealed, that pale hand now fingering a strand of steel beads weighed down by a prominent cross-shaped pendant. Like himself, the man had kept his hood up but the edge of the cloth swept back at an angle that revealed a striking jaw line, lips moving in near-silence over the syllables of a rapid prayer.

That wasn’t quite the reassurance he had been looking for.

‘Y’know,’ McCoy murmured, ‘for someone who was in such a damn hurry to get that, you’re not in near as much of a rush to drink it.’

McCoy cursed himself several awkward beats after the words left his damn foolish mouth. Making confrontational small talk didn’t fit his or Jim’s definition of lying low; it was nerves, alienation, and his usual piss-poor impulse control that had moved his lips and caused those fingers to still upon their beads. He held his breath, held his pathetic beer tighter as the man at his side shifted audibly on his barstool.

‘The clergy take a vow to observe the rites of prohibition,’ he said stiffly. ‘Alcohol is a weakness, and a sin.’

‘I’m not disagreeing with you.’ McCoy attempted another mouthful of his drink, winced as it burned down his throat. ‘But that being the case, this seems an awfully odd place for a clergyman.’

Alcohol and the realization that this exchange had not yet resulted in his death encouraged McCoy to risk a better look at his neighbour. The other man had turned as well, allowing McCoy a glimpse of the face beneath the thickly woven hood that rivaled his own for secrecy.

What he saw was breathtaking: angular yet undeniably attractive features, freckled with delicate scars that paled in significance to the prominent tattoo tracing his furrowed brow, sweeping down the patrician bridge of his nose. Its form echoed the pendant on his string of beads and stirred some subconscious significance that belonged nowhere near this planet but whatever shock was coursing through his brain was nothing to the other man’s death rattle of a gasp, the draining of all blood from his face.

‘ _You…_ ’ A hand snatched back his hood before McCoy could retreat backward off his barstool, leaving him exposed and stunned as some deeper horror tore at that stoic face. Uncertain of what he had done to trigger such fear, already wary of making it worse, McCoy froze in a panicked paralysis, cringing into himself as quivering fingertips hovered over his brow.

‘You cannot be…’ A whisper: it seemed almost an accident from lips that moved over the shapes of words that never reached McCoy’s ears. ‘You were lost…’

 _I still am._ The thought flickered involuntarily across his mind and thankfully went no further than the inside of his throbbing skull. Not that he had any idea what else he could say. Even now, as he struggled to respond to this stranger’s incoherence, that first was morphing before his eyes into something harder, more threatening.

‘How could you have emerged from that pit?’ he asked sharply, nonsensically. The hand dropped away from his face, retreated back into the stranger’s cloak. ‘You were taken… I _saw you_ dragged away…’

Warily, McCoy slipped down from his seat, took the measure of steps to the exit in a trained glance as any delusions of safety in this place scattered into dust. His path clear, McCoy kept a watchful eye on the other man, noted the violent rush of hyperventilation taking hold and slipped a precautionary hand inside his own cloak as he stole his first careful step away.

‘ _Stay._ ’ The barked command was raw and broken, but there was no weakness in the force that flung him up against the bar’s unforgiving ledge, no tremor in the fingers that caught him by the hair and snapped the angle of his head. His desperate rage was plain to read, sharp as the flash of steel McCoy glimpsed at the corner of his eye before instincts he never knew he possessed moved his own hand. Satisfaction flared perversely hot in his chest as those haunted blue eyes flew wide, flicked incredulously downward.

‘What in God’s name is that?’

‘ _That_ ,’ McCoy snarled, gouging his phaser harder into the other man’s chest, ‘is going to end you if you don’t move that knife away from my goddamn throat.’

A dark, determined shadow passed over the other man’s face, an grim twist of a smile that only deepened his aura of feral danger. ‘Is that what you were sent to do, demon?’

‘No, damn it,’ he snapped. ‘I came here for a goddamn drink, and maybe I don’t have much of a plan beyond that but believe you me, dying wasn’t what I had in mind.’

‘You…’ Amazingly, the blade pressed to his neck faltered. ‘You haven’t come for vengeance?’

‘Of course not,’ he scoffed, eyes narrowing at the oddly vulnerable edge to the question. Keeping his trigger finger steady, McCoy let his phaser drop slightly, exhaled shakily as his tentative truce finally broke the contact of knife to throat. The other man pushed out his own audible breath, took a deliberate step backward that seemed to diminish his entire body into a doubting shell of his formerly terrifying self.

‘Then… why, no, _how_ are you here?’ The other man gave his head a shake, as though willing an apparition from his sight. Uncertainly, McCoy glanced about, perturbed to see that their near-fatal exchange had elicited no interest from anyone else in the room. He was on his own for this one, which at least wasn’t a change from where he had started.

Mind working rapidly, he cast a slower gaze over the other man, reading the tightness of the shadows beneath those pale eyes. Whatever threat this stranger posed was unraveling rapidly the longer he stared back, giving way to something uncertain, even fragile.

‘I… don’t know,’ he decided.

‘You don’t remember?’

‘No,’ he said firmly, honestly. McCoy swallowed tightly, broke eye contact with a shiver of guilt he couldn’t place. ‘I needed a safe place for the night,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Just until morning. I only came here to stay out of the way, I swear I don’t want any trouble…’

‘I have an apartment.’ Returning the strange man’s gaze, McCoy was startled to see something equally reluctant beneath his steel-sharp stare. ‘Not so far from here. Not exactly mine, the church…’ He shook his head sharply. ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ll be safe there.’

‘Oh.’ The offer left him stunned, wrong-footed against the slippery tide of this man who had so nearly taken his life only a minute ago. McCoy glanced wistfully back at his awful canteened beer as he considered. ‘That’s, er, mighty kind of you to offer but I’m sure I’ll manage…’

‘I insist. Whatever you are, you’re not safe here.’ He drew back a step, gave the rest of the bar a sweeping, searching look as he adjusted the drape of his cowl to conceal his face. ‘Come with me,’ he murmured. ‘And stay close.’

Pale fingers caught the edge of his cloak, gave him a subtle tug towards the door. The hand drifted away as they fell into the city, but McCoy needed no further encouragement to pace his steps to match the strange man now that his decision was seemingly made. Aided by the path he carved through the streets, the confusion of this city pierced with blue light and condemnations coalesced into their own twisted logic of narrow grids and shuffling beings whose eyes remained fixed as ever on the cobbles. As they walked, McCoy couldn’t help but notice how the other pedestrians parted almost unconsciously around them, though he also caught the occasional stare trailing in their wake – fascinated, but wary. A child out far past her bedtime pointed, before her exhausted mother slapped her hand back down again.

McCoy hid a scowl deep in his cloak, and sped his step to draw nearer the stranger’s side.

The man’s apartment was sparse, but secure. McCoy’s eye lingered over the cross mounted prominently on a stretch of bare wall as he shrugged off his cloak, huddling it into his arms for lack of a place to hang it up.

‘There’s only the one bed,’ the stranger said stiffly. McCoy turned, raised an eyebrow at the plainly modest bed pushed against the wall, as stark as the table and chair opposite, the sideboard beneath the cross. He scanned the concrete floor, then released a silent sigh.

‘I shouldn’t sleep,’ he decided.

‘You’re exhausted.’ Those cold eyes searched his face as the other man took his cloak, hung it alongside his own in a narrow wardrobe built into the wall. The clothes he wore beneath were as impoverished as the apartment, threadbare over a lean body that prowled with strength held ready to strike. McCoy steadied his nerves as the man drew nearer, gaped in surprise as he dropped to his knees instead.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll pray.’ He smoothed his hands down his powerful thighs before clasping them together, lifting his head to fix McCoy with a questioning, slightly ironic look. He shot an anxious glance at the cross on the wall, looked pointedly away.

‘Wouldn’t be quite right,’ he admitted, shifting subtly to place his back to the nearest wall, hand slipping back down to the phaser on his belt. ‘If you don’t mind…’

‘Not at all.’ A strange little smile quirked the clergyman’s mouth. ‘I wouldn’t have expected anything else of you, brother. Please,’ he went on, a solemn nod, ‘lay yourself down. Rest.’

As though that decided the matter, the man bowed his head in prayer, leaving McCoy to marvel dumbly over the contradiction of his shorn, submissive head and the powerful shoulders that strained the thin cloth of his shirt before shaking off the aching distraction of it all. He turned away, scrubbing self-consciously at his mussed hair as he eyed the bed, narrow but thick with blankets. The very sight of it deepened the exhaustion in his bones, worn raw by a long night’s flight through this godforsaken place and sick with worry for Jim and the rest of the away team, trapped outside these oppressive walls along with whatever the hell those walls were meant to keep out in the first place.

He dropped onto the edge of the mattress with an inward groan, sagging forward to tug off his boots. Accepting the offer of a bed was starting to look downright sensible, to say nothing of less awkward than hovering over a clergyman’s prayers. His faint murmurs drifted to McCoy’s ears, low and strangely soothing as he stretched out along the mattress and blinked wearily at the damp-stained ceiling. Come daybreak, he would need all the strength he could muster to safely reach Jim and the rest of the away team: strength, and no small amount of luck. Even divine intervention, if this man’s gods were the sort who listened to those fervent whispers still issuing like a river from restless lips, taut with desperation even as the endless cadence of words drew McCoy’s eyes shut and turned his head on the thin pillow, resolving not to lose consciousness in this stranger’s bed but only to rest, only for a little while…

When his eyelids next fluttered open, the room had become something else – its poverty cloaked by extinguished lights, its chill smothered by the heat of a body curled close around him. McCoy stirred blearily from his unintentional sleep, awareness clinging to a powerful calf slipped over his leg, quivering fingers hovering over his cheekbone, a faint whisper that breathed so close against his lips.

‘I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to let you go… I’m sorry… brother…’

The brush of lips over the bridge of his nose startled his eyes open, already too late to hide his wakefulness from the stranger’s intense stare. His eyes were so close, so blue and bloodshot and raw with refusal to apologize for the uninvited intimacy of that kiss, or the unseen touch gliding low on his hip, an infinitesimal hypnotic circle that coaxed McCoy unconsciously closer to the gravity of the other man’s steadily strong body.

Nothing in what McCoy did next made the slightest sense – he should have shoved his way out of this bed, out the door if not all the way back into the night. It was surely exhaustion, the delirium of a dream already forgotten that held his weary body captive, his own pathetic heart that answered this stranger’s unknown pain with a tentative kiss to those temptingly parted lips. The fingers on his hip stilled at the first cautious brush of his mouth, tightened to a quivering handhold as something both greedy and bold encouraged McCoy to test the slack shape of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. He fell open with an ease McCoy would not have expected from this reserved creature, deepening the kiss with a hunger that startled McCoy nearly as much as the hot, hard arousal nudging his thigh as their bodies surged closer together.

A needy, aching sound vibrated against his lips, painful enough for McCoy to pull back in concern. ‘Is this…’

‘I don’t…’ In the dark, the flush of his pale face was barely perceptible. ‘I’m not asking for… I never wanted–’

McCoy silenced him with another kiss, held it steady and safe with fingers that lingered luxuriously over a sharp cheekbone, the fine nap of his cropped hair. ‘Shh… easy, darling…’ The stranger’s every uncertainty strengthened his belief in this, every protective impulse in his body swelling to the fore. ‘I won’t take anything you ain’t offering,’ he murmured gently, repressing an internal rush of madness at this bizarre reversal of the tide between them, this point when the man who might have killed him some unknown time ago had become someone worth protecting, worth cherishing if he could. ‘But if there’s anything I can do, any way I…’

This time, the other man lunged in for a kiss before he could finish his thought. When that hand on his hip drifted down between his legs, McCoy merely moaned his permission and returned the touch with equal intent. He rolled on his back, took the stranger along with an arm wrapped low around his waist. Thighs intertangled, tongues delved between private mumbles of pointless words as they moved together, hands shoving at the hems of shirts and wrestling with confining trousers. McCoy growled softly as he finally nudged coarse cloth down the stranger’s strong thighs and groped the restless muscle of a firmly sculpted ass and up the curve of his spine. His fingers gouged greedily into a heaving shoulder blade, a strangled cry escaping his throat as teeth scraped hard over his collarbone, sank deeper to claim a suckling bite.

‘Not a mark on you…’ His awed hush breathed hot over McCoy’s neck, even as blunt fingernails fought to unmake the words with raking scratches over his chest. ‘So pure…’

Despite the quiet admiration in his voice, every slide of the stranger’s fingers and tongue preyed upon every sex-spoiled impulse rushing thick through McCoy’s body. There was nothing wholesome in the rough friction of the anonymous cock thrusting alongside his own desperate erection, nothing of a prayer in the harsh filth he growled into the other man’s ear to drive him on, nothing clean in the sweat of their bodies that soon slid slick with come, slaking the heat of the scratches and toothed bruises marking McCoy’s trembling body.

The kiss that he pressed to a tattooed brow as the man fell into uneasy sleep minutes later was, perhaps, something tender and kind – forgiveness and apology both, though for what he couldn’t begin to explain.

\+ + +

_Looks like we can get in through the eastern gate once it opens._ Despite his determined tone, Jim’s voice was rough with exhaustion over the comm. _I’m not sure what we’ll be in for once we get in but I’ll take our chances._

‘Screw that,’ McCoy peered over the city through the tight sliver he had opened in the window shutter. ‘I can meet you out there in twenty minutes. We should get our asses back to the beam-out point. There’s nothing for us in here.’

 _We’ll discuss it once you’re at the gate._ The defiant clip of his answer didn’t fill McCoy with much hope of escape anytime soon. _Get here safe, Bones. Kirk out._

He snapped his comm shut with a sigh, reading the graying light of the sky with a hard squint as he tucked the comm beneath his cloak. His fingers ticked anxiously over his phaser, the emergency med kit strapped to his belt as he turned away from the window, ready to retreat until unexpectedly awake blue eyes startled him short.

‘Only the church can speak with a disembodied voice such as that.’ The odd observation dropped dull from the man’s lips, though his gaze remained sharp, even accusatory. McCoy couldn’t hold that gaze for long; hell, he was already staring shamefully at his boots. As mornings-after went, this would be an especially awkward one.

‘If you say so.’ His fingers flexed inside his cloak as the stranger rose from the bed and tugged absently at his unfastened trousers, putting them back to rights with efficient flicks of his fingers. The rucked-up shirt, however, was swiftly stripped away in a cleanly executed move that revealed a scarred yet impressive upper body and froze McCoy on the spot – all slack passivity, save for his restless gaze. He must have hidden it badly too, if this taciturn creature was looking so goddamn amused now.

‘So was that an angel speaking to you,’ he asked lightly, ‘or a demon from whatever hell you’ve escaped?’

‘Truth be told, I think the verdict’s out on that one.’ He forced his feet to move, one necessary step at a time closer to the door. ‘Thank you for putting me up, I really do appreciate…’

‘You’re not leaving.’

McCoy flinched, breath trapped in his throat. That could have been a question, even an expression of concern, but that flat tone made it sound a lot more like a command. ‘I’ve got to,’ he protested, forcing a steady defiance into his own voice. ‘I don’t belong here…’

‘ _You do._ ’ After such a slow approach, his sudden rush of movement towards the door made McCoy jump in his own skin as the slam of a powerful hand against the door barred his way. ‘I don’t know why you keep pretending you don’t know me,’ he growled, ‘but I’ll make you remember. _I will._ ’

‘There’s _nothing_ to remember.’ Whatever frail subterfuge he had hoped to dance through this mess unraveled with a harsh snap of his nerves that broke every raw fear in his flesh wide open. ‘Look, I… I don’t know who you think I am, but I swear, I’m just…’

He thought he saw his chance as the man shoved away from the door with a frustrated noise. Heart racing, McCoy made his move, cried out as powerful hands caught him at the shoulders and slammed him up against the wall.

‘I’ll make you remember, brother.’ His breath was hot against McCoy’s cringing face, his fingers claiming bruises through layers of cloth. ‘I’ll bring you back, I’ll…’

Those fervent blue eyes rolled upward in their sockets, fluttered closed with a faint groan. His powerful body slumped forward, nearly overwhelmed McCoy as he braced to catch all that weakened weight in his arms. His depleted hypospray clattered to the floor as he caught the unconscious man in an awkward hold and carried him the mercifully short distance to the bed.

So much like tucking Jim away after another reckless night, if only with a far heavier measure of nameless guilt. McCoy drew the coarse blanket high upon his bare shoulder, thumbed the permanent crease in the tattoo between his brows with a worried frown of his own as he quietly withdrew.

As he knelt to retrieve his hypospray, his upward gaze took in the cross on the wall, the lonely shape he was abandoning on the bed. His lips moved, then pressed together in silence beneath his hood. He would save his apologies for someone who could hear, could understand – perhaps, for the next lonely drink after this one.


End file.
